I have searched and found a couple of topics on this, however I havent found a solution. There are many posts saying its possible, but nothing actually saying how to do it - what I have found so far anyway.

I have a custom board with a 644P on it, and no FTDI interface. I am wanting to use the Arduino IDE with this board, and program directly from the IDE rather than from AVRDude etc.

Can someone please explain what I need to modify in order to allow the IDE to write to the AVR via the Pocket Programmer - Please.

Do I change something in the boards.txt or programmers.txt files? If so, what do I change?I will run the Sanguino based bootloader etc, I just dont understand how to tell the IDE to program via the Procket Programmer.On the sparkfun site, they state this is the type of thing you write to use this programmer: avrdude -c usbtiny -B 1 -patmega328 -U flash:w:main.hexProduct page is here: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9825

There are two parts to your problem:1) You need to program in an Arduino-style bootloader to your chip. To do this you need the Sparkfun AVR Programmer and the AVRDude executable. There isn't really an "off the shelf" 644P compatible bootloader; if you search for Optiboot and get the sources, it has support for the 644p.

2) After your bootloader works, you would use a plain serial connection to your chip (using USART0 with an appropriate USB to TTL converter - SparkFun sells those also). The boards.txt file works with the Arduino IDE to specify the various settings for your project.

I read somewhere that it is possible to use a programmer like the Pocket AVR programmer while you use the Arduino IDE (basically you don't need the serial connection), but I don't have any idea how that would work.

I mate has used the 644P for a few Arduino projects with no issues at all, using the Sanguino Bootloader. It acts just like a regular Arduino but with more IO etc.

Its just the part of getting the IDE to program over the ISP port via the Pocket Programmer that I dont understand how to set up.Getting the IDE to program over USB via a FTDI connection to a 644P is no problem.

I just dont know how to put them both together.I dont have the board on me to test either. Its currently being used in a workshop, so when I go to do the upgrade I need to do, I need it to work else the machine will be out of action till I figure out how to fix it.I programmed it via Bascom AVR using an old Parallel programmer in the past, but want to upgarde it to Arduino and use the newer sparkfun pocket programmer as the PC that had the parallel port has since died, and I cant find the parallel programmer I used either...

Ya know that makes me wanna start building a "Never Ending boards.txt" file for whoever needs it because it's aggrivating to see that things are done time and time again, and documented but then it get's swept in a sea of data that's really hard to search for, and then you have to go looking for it all over again. Maybe something of a wiki?